


leaving my shadow (still to be with you)

by obfuscatress



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 14:41:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14673264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: All childhood is an emigration.





	leaving my shadow (still to be with you)

**Author's Note:**

> Written and edited very hastily while ill; I apologise for any remaining mistakes.
> 
> Title from Anna Akhmatova's poem "You Will Hear Thunder". Summary and beginning quote from Carol Ann Duffy's "Originally".

 

“All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,

leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenue

where no one you know stays. Others are sudden.”

 

* * *

 

I.

He is larger than life, all you truly know. You’ve met other children, of course, and there’s Mummy, but it isn’t the same. They are loud and expressive, crowd you and suffocate you in your own silences, because you don’t own many words yet. Well, that isn’t quite true, is it?

They’re forming in your mind like galaxies in the dark, these syllables people utter at you, but their light has yet to reach your lips. You only speak with purpose and purpose is hard to effect if you stumble over the vowels and mix up the consonants, so you sound the letters silently a thousand times over while your brother reads in the bay window, until you feel confident you can ask Mummy for strawberries in a high, clear voice that is not your own but Arkem’s.

It is not the only thing you have borrowed from him. You have his eyes and his hair and now you’re gunning for his intonation too — made up entirely of your father’s words. But it is Arkem’s words you want, not Daddy’s. You want the quiet, measured sentences that sound strange in his child’s voice. You like the way he reads: slow and monotone, not yet narrating like all the adults around you.

He is nine and you are three, and sometimes, standing in his shadow on the pavement, you cease to have your own.

 

 

II.

Mummy is beautiful. You have always thought so. It’s a fact that has wormed its way into your heart, her warmth resonating in the hollow of your bones.  You look up at her and you love her in a way that aches, like laying your eyes upon the sun. You look up at her and she loves you without you trying.

But you are not the only one she looks at like that. She has another softness for Arkem, related to yours the way you’re related to him.

You hate it because you want her to yourself, or perhaps it is him you want for yourself. You love him like you love her, and they both love you, but they also love each other, and the tension of this delicate system in flux is enough to keep you up at night.

It’s better when father is home because the eyes she has for him are different. They’re sharp and hungry instead of radiating the soft patience she’s reserved for the two of you. It’s not something you can be jealous of because you don’t understand it yet. It’s not something you have to be jealous of ever, because when Mummy’s busy, Arkem is all yours.

 

III.

You learn to read the same way you learn to speak: on an exponential curve. It is only letters first; lines without meaning becoming sounds, sounds becoming song. You read faster and faster every day, amass more words and pages, and you’re starting to see why Arkem spends all his summer afternoons in the shade of the oak tree in the garden, flipping lazily through old paperback copies of Agatha Christie’s best works. Once you figure this out, you stop babbling and join him.

He teaches you how to use a dictionary for the big words you’ve never seen before. You don’t know how they sound, nor does he, because they’re not things you hear on people’s tongues around here.

(You write them all down — trace them onto thin paper through the page because you will not learn how to write for another year to come — and ask father about them when he comes home from the city on Fridays, looking worn and confused in his pinstripe suit as he clutches your clumsy pages in his hands. Still, he sounds them out patiently for you and you repeat them back one by one over coffee and cake on Sunday afternoon.)

Sometimes, it’s Arkem who reads to you, his words adrift in the breeze that makes the leaves dance above your heads. You lie in the grass and squint up into the too bright sky flickering in the foliage above, wondering what you’ll do come September when he’s gone again.

You are five and he is eleven, and you wish you could go to school already. Instead, you chase him A to Z along the cracked spines on his bookshelf.

 

IV.

It is your father who teaches you to swim. It’s at the end of that same summer, August glowing golden against the expanse of the ocean. This water is new to you, so much larger than the bathtub you sit in every evening, unfathomable even in the context of the slimy green pond stretching out lazily behind Oma’s house. This water tastes of a sweaty afternoon of playing hide and seek, your mouth pressed into your forearm where you’re lying flat on your stomach in the tall grass, and it burns when it gets in your eyes, but that’s never stopped you before. You’ve scratched your hands raw climbing trees and skinned your knees when your bike went out from under you.

This time though, in spite of the arms under your back and the floaties holding your head above water, you allow yourself to be a little bit afraid, because the ocean is not a six foot drop to the ground or your body slamming into the gravel road at seven miles an hour, and even your small mind is big enough to comprehend there is danger in its vastness.

Two days later, you’re kicking cautious circles around your mother, convinced that the safety of her presence is larger than the waves bobbing you up and down on the surface of this squirming gargantuan.

In the distance, Arkem is scaling the waves without you and without assistance, always miles ahead with his oh-so-long limbs.

 

V.

When you learn to write, it’s in sticks that take weeks to straighten out and it looks nothing like Arkem’s neat cursive, him and Mummy sitting side by side at the dining table writing thank you notes for her fortieth birthday party. You try to start slanting your letters to mimic theirs, but they never quite look the same and it gets you in trouble at school, so you stop.

This is theirs, not yours. What is Arkem’s, you can have, and most of what’s Mummy’s can be yours too, but the things that are theirs leave no space for you.

 

VI.

You find a new language in maths. The numbers are weird at first, not something you have to fit your tongue around, not something malleable by muscle power alone. You have to learn to fabricate them in your mind where you can bend them to your will and mold them as you please, the silent evidence of your thoughts graphite grey on the lined page Arkem tore out of his notebook for you.

You write your numbers the same way he does — compact scrawls arranged in intimate lines along the left margin of the page

Your homework is boring, so you try to do his, but there are letters in the questions and you’re ahead of your time, but even you haven’t learnt about letters mixing with numbers. Arkem sees the confused, incomplete rows you’ve copied from him and he must be bored too because he decides to teach you about polynomials instead of finishing his own questions.

Years later, it is Arkem who is lost when he gathers your notes off the floor and all the equations are gibberish to him. You’ve outgrown him in at least this one little discipline. It just so happens to stretch across the entire universe.

 

VII.

Physics is both the subject where you intersect and separate. Arkem is seventeen and you have just turned eleven, the both of you sitting cross legged on his bed with a textbook lying open between you. You’ve learned to read upside down with ease over the last four years so you can secretly keep up with him while you pretend to be doing the collection of sudokus in the morning paper. He used to pester you about minding your own business, so you learned to finish your homework at the back of the bus before you even got home. He can’t slam the door in your face if you’re already in his room, sat still and out of his way by the time he gets home, so he leaves you be, lets you sink into the background like static.

When Arkem starts to neglect his school issued textbooks for the shiny white entrance exam guides that comes in the mail, you co-opt them for yourself to read after dark, your mind bending around the concepts of optics in the low light of your bedside lamp. This is the first time you truly step out of his shadow, your own looming large and distorted on the wall behind you.

 

VIII.

You are still eleven when he leaves you. You first hear the news twenty-eight days before he finally goes and the thought is so incomprehensible, it still hasn’t sunk in by the time Mummy is crying into Arkem’s shoulder in the parlour, saying her goodbyes. You aren’t sure what this means for you —  don’t know what to do with the anxious weight that’s lodged itself in your stomach. You’ve watched his room be dismantled into cardboard boxes while the living room corner aggregated large bags of brand new pillows, duvets, and dishes, awaiting not an arrival but a departure.

For him, this is just a new stage in life. He has lived six years without you and almost twice as many with you, but _you_ have never known life without _him_.

Sometimes you wondered what it would be like. You daydreamed about when you were fighting — after you’d kicked him hard enough to bruise and he’s shoved you into the wall with an impact that made your insides rattle — when you retreated to sulk and lick your wounds.

But you had too many shared hours of companionable silence to ever entertain the idea properly. Perhaps that is why you don’t expect it: vacuous silence he leaves behind. Arkem’s always been the quiet kind, but what you mistook for white noise in the backdrop of your daily lives, was actually his presence all along. The absence of it brings you face to face with how bare the bones of your life are without him.

Father tells you the feeling will go away eventually when he catches you in Arkem’s room one night, thumbing listlessly through an volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s the first one the two of you snuck out of Daddy’s library together, your brother hoisting you up on his shoulders so you could reach it, the combined height of you still supercedeing anything either of you could achieve on your own. It’s a crutch you’ve always had and you don’t realise just how small you are without Arkem until weeks later when you’re standing firmly on your own two feet in the field beyond the back garden, the rain softened ground sinking a little beneath you with every step you move away from the house.

That weekend, you beg him to come home, back turned to Mummy and voice pitched quiet  over the phone so she doesn’t notice you’re crying.

 

IX.

You begin to understand it slowly, the horizon that drew him away from you. You are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and the fields outside keep changing colours while your mind wilts. You keep your nose buried in books and your words sparse, start to concoct a plan of escape.

Mummy’s not thrilled, but you know it’s only because you’re her youngest. She’s reluctant to let you go as easily as him, and it annoys you as much as it comforts you, because at least it means you’re not the only one missing him.

Father is right though: Eventually the pain is buried beneath so many layers of hurt, frustration, anger, and apathy, you lose sight of the light that used to be nestled under all that, numb now.

It’s not a perfect seal and sometimes, when Arkem comes home for a week or two in the holidays, you see the cracks in the façade and you have to wonder: Does Arkem have them too, these scars that bleed like newly cut wounds whenever he’s around you? Are your old selves still there, mummified in these new bodies?

Two weeks after Easter, on your third distracted hour of statistics, you decide it doesn’t matter. If they’re really in there, they’ll have suffocated by now. You’re going to become someone new somewhere else and, if needs be, you’ll eventually kill that version of yourself too.

 

X.

There is a cavernous space behind your heart where you used to keep your brother, tucked close under your ribs. It grows with the years as you do, stretches out with your arms and legs and spine. You’re sixteen when you reach his height and you no longer look like delayed mirror images of one another.

You still have the same eyes and the same hair, but you’ve grown into different shapes. The bones in his face are foreign to you now, the twin moles at the base of his neck hidden in the knot of a purple tie when he comes home for Mother’s day.

He’s a stranger in the parlour and you hide the newfound angles of your wrists in the sleeves of an oversized jumper, shielding your rabbiting pulse from him. You know he doesn’t know you anymore — not really — and you take comfort in that because it means you’re not any more exposed under the sweep of his his calculating, twenty-two-year-old eyes than he is under your cold teenage glare.

“Silas,” he says, head tipping with muted acknowledgement, and you think your name still sounds exactly the same in his mouth.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on twitter under @shippress!


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